In recent years, accompanying the introduction of UNIX (registered trademark) servers and IA serves to core systems, the high availability of UNIX (registered trademark) servers and IA servers has been emphasized. As a general rule, when a fatal error has occurred in a system, the system is brought to an emergency stop (panic), and memory dumps are stored in a disk so as to determine the cause.
While a system is in a shutdown state, it is not possible to use that system, and accordingly it is important to be able to reactivate the system promptly.
However, in recent years, servers mounting memories with a capacity on the order of terabytes (TB) have emerged, and collecting memory dumps in such systems takes a long period of time, preventing prompt reactivation of systems.
A method in which memory contents at the time of the occurrence of a panic are stored in another memory without storing memory dumps in a disk is known. Also, a method in which memory contents are partially stored when memory contents at the time of the occurrence of a failure are stored in a dump storage area and memory contents that were not stored are converted into a dump file after reactivation is known.
The above described conventional methods store memory dumps at the time of the occurrence of failure in a different memory or a disk, taking a long period of time to copy the memory when memory dumps to be stored are of a large size, and systems cannot be promptly reactivated, which is problematic.
Also, when an operating system has detected a fatal error and has stopped the system, the operating system which detected the abnormality collects dumps, and sometimes detects the abnormality again during the dump collection operation to cause secondary damage such as hang-ups, which is problematic.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 11-212836
Patent Document 2: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2001-229053
Patent Document 3: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2006-72931
Patent Document 4: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2005-122334